UV Letters

My college roommate Chris was notorious for a few things. Chris looked vaguely Nordic and enjoyed putting on a Viking helmet, taking off all his clothes, and venturing out to Cross Campus Lawn to ask unwitting pedestrians if they knew where the German Club was meeting. He was also renowned for going to great...

I was 15 when I first understood the importance of training. I'd been hired at a Toronto Baskin Robbins and after a few weeks was deemed a sufficiently reliable scooper that franchise owner Mr. Pirani gladly accepted my offer to refer two of my younger brothers for employment.

In my experience, telling someone they're getting something for free leads to problems. My first job out of college was in management consulting where I spent the majority of my tenure at one of the old "music clubs" that offered 12 CDs for a penny. This offer yielded two distinct forms of bad...

It's funny how weird things seem normal when you grow up with them. Toronto in the 70s and 80s was no exception. Like only being able to buy beer from a government store that wouldn't have been out of place in the Soviet Union. Like the fact that two of the eight teams in the Canadian Football League shared...

My wife Yahlin and I got married where we'd met nearly a dozen years earlier: college. Because we were living in New York and both working full-time, we sought help from a New Haven theatre set designer who moonlighted as a wedding planner. Or rather, Yahlin...

I'm not always great at predicting the future. Sure, two decades ago I believed online universities would be a thing. Then the moment MOOCs appeared, I made the correct call that MOOCs would be about as important as the Spice Girls. Most important, I moved to Brooklyn long before it was hip. But my brother often reminds me of the time I suggested to him and our friend...

There's a lot of room for speculation when it comes to the Yale secret society Skull and Bones. During the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. Bush commented it was "a secret society; so secret, I can't say anything more." And when John Kerry was...

One of the great tragedies of my childhood involved Olivia Newton-John. It wasn't her 1981 video for Physical, although, in retrospect, the spandex spawned therefrom was a tragic crime of fashion. No, it was three years earlier: her introduction to a mass audience...

Before there was Facebook or Google - even before there was Microsoft - one of the most successful ventures to come out of a college dorm room was National Lampoon. As chronicled in the terrific (but definitely R-rated) documentary "Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead," National Lampoon was founded by two editors of the Harvard Lampoon who convinced...